MINIMAL KITTY

Art and Amphetamine Psychosis

 

When I was 17, I went from being a casual speed user to bring a hardcore, unregenerate speed freak, replete with blue vinyl stretch pants, dreadlocks and vintage gold pumps.  My peers and I didn’t really understand meth at the time — we thought it was a cheaper version of cocaine but less addictive; the safe and thrifty version!  I absolutely loved meth, because I had been running around with undiagnosed ADHD since I was in elementary school. Meth really chilled me out - it finally allowed me to focus and concentrate all night long on doing extremely strange art projects. (It amused me greatly later in life when I was prescribed Adderall, or dextroamphetamine.  It told me that when I had been on my yearlong drug binge, I had been self-medicating semi-correctly.) The thing about meth, though, is that all the sleepless nights eventually make you lose every ounce of your fucking mind. 

In San Francisco there had been a graffiti artist who called himself “Minimal Man,” who had been stenciling large tribal masks on the sidewalk corners of the Haight-Ashbury.  Rumor had it that he too was a speed freak, before he killed himself by jumping through a top story window.  I admired his dedication and drive, however, and decided he needed some competition, so I invented “Minimal Kitty,”  which was a stencil I made of Hello Kitty with an eyepatch, evoking Minimal Man’s style.  I sprayed it all over the Haight.  At the height of my Minimal Kitty obsession (and it was an obsession — I sprayed that stencil on everything and started making a deck of Minimal Kitty tarot cards), I was also riding a skateboard and wearing an eye-patch, which was idiotic because I had no depth perception and kept hitting things. 

There was an array of characters that used to hang around my roommate Tod the God, the speed dealer.   There was a cat burglar who would occasionally slip through our second story window to sleep in Tod’s closet; he once brought over ropes of pearls and a real leopardskin rug with a head on it.  The burglar was a sweet kid whose main fantasy in life was to be covered with puppies.  There was a girl named Pele with a fishhook tattooed on her neck who used to come over to the house in a bloody nurse uniform. One guy named Dave — one of those real serious, intense little wiry Irish guys — hung around a lot; he was in a punk band called “Morally Bankrupt.”  

When I heard that Morally Bankrupt was going to be playing a gig in the middle of San Francisco’s Union Square, I figured I’d show up to  support our Dave. I reckoned I would make an avant garde art project in his honor and set it up somewhere near the stage, to lend to the general atmosphere of punk rock hooliganism. 

And so it came to pass that the Minimal Kitty Abortion Festival was created.  I don’t remember how I got all the materials or how long it took, but there I was, the day of Dave’s concert, higher than a rabbit’s screaming voice, sitting on a picnic blanket in Union Square surrounded by multiple stretched out wire hangers with little pink plastic babies hanging off of the ends, covered in bloody red paint.  I thought they were sort of festive, like sparklers or little flags, and I sat on the sidewalk waving them merrily. 

The punk rock performance got off without a hitch — nobody could possibly determine if they were playing their instruments badly or not, the band was so deplorable. 

I had been being widely ignored all day by the tourists of Union Square, who somehow hadn’t quite been able to grok the whimsical spirit of the Minimal Kitty Abortion Festival, and walked past me as quickly as possible. 

Dave, however, was another story.  He finished his set and walked over to my blanket, sweating and wild-eyed.  “I just want you to know,” he told me, ”that when I got onstage, and saw what you were doing, I found it so incredibly disturbing that I couldn’t play.”  I felt like this was some kind of victory — I was more morally bankrupt than Morally Bankrupt! But Dave shook his head, shot me a haunted look and fizzled away, leaving me somewhat crestfallen.

I don’t know what I thought was going to happen, with this art project — I hoped that somebody would appreciate it, but there were no takers.  Finally, right as I was about to pack it all up, I connected to a  member of the audience. 

A weird German guy in an overcoat emerged out of some bushes and walked up to me.   His eyes were brimming with appreciation, and probably an assortment of drugs equal to what I was on.  

“I’ve been searching all over the world for something like this,” he said, staring at my bloody coat hangers, smiling gratefully.  I felt seen and understood, finally.   “I want to give you something,” he said.  “Here!” 

He held out his hand and I held out mine.  He dropped a costume jewelry ring in my hand that looked like a sea anemone with fake diamonds all over it.  “It’s a very special ring.  I’ve been through a lot of shit with it,” he said.  Then he crawled back in the bushes.  But I felt totally validated.  Someone finally GOT IT.  And the ring, because I was on drugs, seemed magical and lucky, even when it turned my finger green.

Much later in life I was dating a Nietzsche scholar who told me about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  A work of art, he said, can’t really exist without a member of the audience that is capable of appreciating it.  That is why, to this day, I am extremely grateful for German men who live in bushes, if not the Philistine Dave.  “The function of art,” as Barbra Streisand once said, “is to disturb.” 

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Ronettes,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020